Jonathan Vaughters walked into Bones restaurant Tuesday with two-day stubble and major one-day jet lag. Still, he had a bigger hop in his step than normal. He had just landed the night before from Paris after his Boulder-based Team Garmin-Cervelo won the biggest race in its history.
A man recognized the narrow, bespectacled face of Colorado cycling and shook his hand.
“Congrats,” the man said. “You had a great team that day.”
It probably didn’t hit the radar of the average fan at the corner sports bar, but the state’s legion of passionate cycling fans know Garmin-Cervelo is standing atop the cycling world today.
Johan Van Summeren, a 30-year-old Belgian in his third year with Garmin-Cervelo, won Sunday’s prestigious Paris-Roubaix stage race, the biggest spring classic in the world.
How big? Besides the three Grand Tours — tours of Italy, France and Spain — the calendar’s biggest races are the five major one-day spring classics, known as the Five Monuments.
Paris-Roubaix (pronounced Perry-RowBAY) is one of the oldest bike races in the world. It began in 1896 and has been won by all the greats of cycling lore from Fausto Coppi to Eddy Merckx to Bernard Hinault.
In 116 years, Garmin-Cervelo is the first American team to win it.
“We had a lot of pressure in that we had a great team coming into the year, but whether or not we’d be able to get all the chiefs to function together was under question,” Vaughters said. “I think we proved that worked out as well.”
It’s the first Monument win for Vaughters’ team in only its seventh year on the Pro Tour but a year in which he set three goals: Win a Monument, win a stage in the Tour de France and win the overall team title.
It’s highly unlikely a Garmin-Cervelo athlete will stand in first place in Paris after the Tour de France, but Vaughters’s team is built around balance rather than star power.
This past year he brought in Norwegian Thor Hushovd, a former world road race champion and eight-time Tour de France stage winner. He teams with veteran Christian Vande Velde and sprinter Tyler Farrar as Grand Tour stage winners.
What Van Summeren did Sunday was the equivalent of a utility baseball player hitting for the cycle.
“We show up with eight strong riders,” Vaughters said. “We don’t have one superstar and seven mediocre riders.”
That’s why Van Summeren, who grew up just 120 miles from the finish in northern France, won the race of his dreams. He stumbled home despite a flat tire suffered three miles from the finish and with defending champion Fabian Cancellara bearing down on him.
After the race, Van Summeren stunned an international audience and his girlfriend by proposing at the finish line. Yes, she said yes. Vaughters hopes his proposal for 2011 goes just as well.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
